During my professional career I have become accustomed to the development tools that make the engineer’s job much easier. On the other hand I’ve come to the realization that little time and attention is being spent on optimization and proper use of those tools. While there is plenty of information out there on framework comparisons, guides, APIs, and the like very few products seem to adopt the best practices and the tier two functionality slips through the cracks of the Q&A process. This is usually the case with logging.
Log4J is the status quo when it comes to logging in Java. With the expanded mainstream popularity the framework which has been branched in C++ (Log4cxx) ,  C#/.NET (Log4Net) and even PHP (Log4php) has made it easy to add logging to multi tier applications. The advantage of having a very granular approach with different log levels (DEBUG, INFO, ERROR, etc.) and the Logger package inheritance make it a flexible tool. Without getting into details on the configuration and how to get started I want to spend time on the proper Logger initialization and use for exception handling.

Log4J Logger

As described in the Logger API we can get our Logger initialized inside the class in one of several ways the most common of which are:

- using the Class object

Logger log = Logger.getLogger(getClass());

- using a string

Logger log = Logger.getLogger(getClass().getName());

or

Logger log = Logger.getLogger("com.java.foo.MyClass");

Once we have a logger instance we can easily log messages with different threshold:

Foo foo = new Foo();
log.info("Created object foo: " + foo.toString());

or

if(log.isDebugEnabled())
{
	//do something
	log.debug("Result: " + foo.getResult());
}

Exception handling

It gets more interesting when we get to exception handling. In the regular try catch scenario we usually deal with some exception where we want to collect some output about what happened and where. A lot of times developers are tempted to use exception.getMessage() which is often empty or yet worse call exception.printStackTrace() which actually prints to the standard output rather than our log file. In order to successfully print the exception message and the stack trace we can add the exception to the logger output by doing this instead:

try
{
	computeInterestRates();
}
catch(Exception e)
{
	//something went wrong - log an error
	log.error("Error during RateCalc: ", e);
}

Conclusion

It is easy to get lost in requirements and miss on some of the essential product functionality. The proper use of logging helps reduce and eliminate defects in the lifecycle of the software and be a life saver in the long run. Make sure that you properly handle all logging. Keep in mind that the overuse of logging has a detrimental effect on performance so use it sparingly. For more information see the Log4j Official Documentation.

I cannot quite recall the first time I sent an email except that for all I know it was a long time ago and that it’s only intent was to notify its recipient that I had actually embraced the cyberspace. It was a time when having an email address was a privilege, not a right and 1200bps modems where top of the line. In today’s world I would be quite astonished if somebody told me they don’t have an email. In fact I will be even more surprised if they told me that they have an email which they don’t use on a daily basis to conduct personal and business activities but merely for the purpose of having one.

Today as email becomes more popular than traditional mail we send plain text emails, HTML emails and even rich media emails containing Flash. While the good old plaint text emails were easily readable they were ugly to say the least and not quite well organized as far as data presentation is concenred. With all the advantages that HTML layout and presantation brings to the table come some caveats: even if we assume that all your recepients will be able to see the content (if they have HTML enabled) we can’t be quite sure how it will look on different mail clients due to a number of reasons. The solution: Multipart emails.

What is the Multipart MIME?

The Multipart mime content is just another fancy term for providing more than one version of your email. In reality MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions and was created as a standard to extend the existing one and provide support for [you guessed it] among other things support for multipart message body, non-text attachment and non-ASCII (e.g. UTF8) character encondings. The way multipart content works is by specifying a boundary in the “Content-type:” header of your email. The boundary is used to separate the different content types and looks something like this:

Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="fU3W4Vzr4G3D54f3"

There are no rules as of the content of the boundary but as it must not occur in any of the parts of your message content is usually a randomly generated sequence of numbers, letters or combination of both in order to guarantee uniqueness and differentiate from any possible dictionary words. So as you start your message each data type section is separated by “–” followed by the boundary sequence and the content type + encoding. After the last section “–” followed by the boundary followed by “–” is used to delimit the end of the message. Here is an example of a complete message:

MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="fU3W4Vzr4G3D54f3"

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--fU3W4Vzr4G3D54f3

Content-type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
This is the body of the message.
--fU3W4Vzr4G3D54f3

Content-type: text/html; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

<html>
  <head><title>A HTML email</title></head>
  <body>This is the body of the message.</body>
</html>

--fU3W4Vzr4G3D54f3--

Note that for demonstration purposes we’ve oversimplified the HTML. In a real environment you would want to be as explicit as possible and provide a doctype for your HTML document as well as follow the guidelines as much as possible to ensure uniform rendering across engines.

Some useful tips

So far so good! Now that we are familiar with how the multiheader MIME emails can help you ensure that your message will reach its intended audience we need to spend some time and pay attention to some specifics of formatting.

• Keep it simple – concentrate on your content rather than sophisticated presentation. Focus on your message! As far has the HTML is concerned – don’t get too fancy and code a very simple, old school webpage.
• I can’t stress enough how important HTML formatting is but I want to reiterate that you need to be very careful and make sure to create valid, well formatted HTML. To ensure the quality of your code and the proper rendering I will suggest that you use a professional tool like Dreamweaver of Frontpage or an online validator as the one from the W3C. Of course in addition to that I will suggest testing the rendering in different browsers and email clients to avoid surprises.
• Along the same lines you will need to set an online version of the HTML document and include a link with the URL in the beginning of both the plaintext and HTML versions. This will ensure that your recipient can open the message in a browser if there are any rendering problems, the content is blocked by a spam engine or if the plaintext version is just not good enough. This comes quite useful as usually the purpose of your message is to get the recipient to visit the website and start some sort of interaction.
• Use tricks like capitalizing the headlines and spacing or underlining for distinguishable headlines and section separation. This can be very helpful for plaintext emails as they can often be hard to read.
• As usually spam blockers often prevent some of the images from displaying be careful and don’t overuse images for messages. For all images provide good ‘alt’ attribute description for the content of the image in the cases when they are not shown.
• Webmail based services are more than likely going to slightly modify your code so be prepared to have tags like DOCTYPE, BODY, and HEAD to be stripped. That’s expected as understandably those elements have the chance to interfere with their site.
• Avoid sophisticated designs requiring high width as a lot of the client email preview windows will be just a few hundred pixels wide.
• Don’t rely on heavy use of CSS styles as almost 90% of the time they will get stripped. That’s especially true for services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail as your CSS has a chance to override their own styles.
• Tables are your friend. Really! Use TABLE tags to position the content within your web page. Go back to basics and rely on what’s proven and working across different rendering engines.
• Work with a carefully selected vocabulary. That’s especially true for words you include in the title as they are very likely to stand out when examined by the spam filters.
• Keep your message short. Remember that multiplart MIME emails technically double the length of your email so while they work great for relatively short emails
• Test, Test, Test – That’s really the safest way to make sure that there won’t be surprises. Apart from not accomplishing your goal you are running the risk to loose credibility with your audience.

NEXT: see an example on how to create a multipart MIME email web form in PHP (…coming soon)

Resources:

Mime
Sending both HTML and plain text emails
RFC2045, RFC2046, RFC2047, RFC4288, RFC4289, RFC2077

The Space Shuttle is used by the US government for human spaceflight missions and is designed with the goal to carry astronaut and load such as satellites and modules to the International Space Station. It was first launched on April 12, 1981 and is still in use to present day. Originally six shuttles were built but as the Enterprise was not designed for flight only five were deemed spaceworthy. As Challenger and Columbia were destroyed in takeoff and reentry disasters only 3 currently remain: Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour. More information about the space shuttle and it’s structure you can find here.

Apart from being just a vehicle the shuttle program is a medium in establishing world peace and cooperation.Long gone are the days when space was considered solely expressions of patriotism and competition in the arms race in the Cold War. The shuttle is the main vehicle for transporting modules and equipment from and to the space station. Today the International Space Station (ISS) is the biggest space laboratory known to man and hosts technology and personnel from all over the world. And with STS 120 a new record is set – for the first time in history of space exploration two women are in charge of two spacecrafts at the same time as Pamela Melroy is calling the shots on Discovery and ISS commander Peggy Whitson.

But as high tech as it is some of the design and technology used for the original construction is aged and obsolete and therefore often compared to an old car. Due to safety concerns and a way to provide a honorable retreat for the shuttle NASA has decided to move on. Unfortunately the time and resources needed to maintain and keep up to date with technology are overwhelming and the point was reached to where it’s not worth it. While NASA has announced the retiring of the Shuttle program in 2010 which will be replaced by 2014 by Orion a new age in space exploration is marked. Partly with pride and honor and partly with sadness humanity gets ready for a shift. Not simply a shift of technology but a shift of evolution and creativity of mankind. To honor those who believed, those who dedicated their life and those who lost it I would consider attending a space shuttle launch as one of my top 10 on the TO DO list.

Of course the notoriety of digital media is often associated with piracy and copyright infringement. Although digital media brings the content creator closer to the consumer it is a fact that it bring a little more, less preferred intellectual property issues. And while new digital content is here to stay its adoption by the recording industry whose sales are dropping by the hour has been rather slow. The resistance of the industry to adopt the new standard originated from the scare that this will cut the middle man and as everybody knows middle man means higher cost. On top of that we can point out the underestimated prediction for digital media adoption by consumers which was set to be 7 to 9 years.

A Divorce or temporary separation?

Are the tensions between musicians and the industry a divorce or a simply a search for common ground?! While the recording industry’s profits from music sales sum up to roughly 95% of the profits there are other things angering musicians. The ruthless way in which illegal music downloads are being prosecuted and people are being threatened with jail for simply listening to their favorite musicians has the potential of distancing the artists from their fans. The whole point of using digital content is to bridge that gap and make fans feel closer, be more involved and more enthusiastic about the art. Prominent musicians like Prince and Radiohead have already taken matters in their own hands and promote their new albums independently. Thus instead of “punishing” their fans they promote their music and encourage everybody to obtain legal content at a price they can afford and consider reasonable. The other side of the coin is that the music industry can do a lot for an artist especially when they are young and not very famous. There are countless examples of overnight superstars promoted by the recording industry.

Why buy the cow?

As the old saying says: who will buy the cow if they can get the milk for free? Are consumers increasingly going to cease purchasing in favor of illegally obtained content? Are musicians doomed to less and less money and get ripped by the recording industry? I don’t think so. We are simply witnessing a new frontier which as everything new needs some adjustment and getting used to but at the same time hides countless possibilities. Artists can get fair deals for their music and get closer to their fans, the recording industry can cut some distribution costs, better promote artists and find new ways of making sales. Where does the little guy fit in this picture? Well, the little guy will learn that intellectual property is important and get more access to content the less he abuses it. After all freedom is a responsibility. Responsibility to choose wisely.